Raf

Last thing: calling the Nelson Bible Dictionary unbiased has to be a joke, right? I'm not suggesting it's dishonest, but unbiased? It's apologetic. It's biased by definition. Please read the Nelson entry on the holy Spirit and tell me again it's unbiased.

No

Mark, there's nothing to incite or in your post. There's also nothing to refute my observation that slavery is immoral and that God failed to abolish it when he had the chance. The prevalence of slavery in the cultures of the time coupled with God's failure to abolish it is inconsistent with the existence of a perfectly moral God giving his perfectly moral law to the people. (Consistent would be for other nations to have slaves but for the nation with a truly moral lawgiver to say no. We're going to be different. Remember, our question is not whether ancient Israel was more moral than surrounding nations of the time. It's whether your morality exceeds Yahweh's. On the issue of slavery, it does. Easily). No one is asking anyone else to blame God for allowing slavery in American law. I am asking you all to hold Him accountable for allowing slavery under HIS OWN law. And stop acting as if He had no choice but to allow it because the Israelites demanded it. That position is both unsupported by scripture and morally insufficient. If slavery is morally wrong and the Israelites demanded it anyway, all he had to do was say No! Thou Shalt Not Own People! Isn't the whole POINT of the law to let people know right from wrong? God's endorsement of slavery and his impotence in abolishing it is consistent with a non-existent God invented by people to justify their culture and practices. But again, by all means, demonstrate where I am wrong. So far, neither of you has even come close (and Mark, I think the article you posted actually supports my position overall, that Biblical slavery -- God's version of it, not man's -- is immoral by our standards).

I'll leave it to the readers to determine whether my understanding of your post constitutes a strawman fallacy, TnO. Saying it doesn't make it so. I think I have accurately critiqued what you actually said. So if I haven't accurately represented your position, it is because you have not accurately or completely articulated it. The accusations of impatience are starting to get stale, though. You've been commenting more than a week, sometimes at length, and have yet to support the notion that biblical slavery is morally acceptable. I'll be as patient as you need me to be, but I suspect the emperor is naked here. Please. Prove me wrong. But stop saying you're going to. Any minute now. After these messages.

Using your logic, you'll never be able to find fault with anything God orders, because he's always right and moral and just. THAT'S NOT THINKING. And it's not morality.

Ok, so as long as they're owning, buying, selling, holding wives and children hostage in LOVE, it's okay. Never mind that these folks were a thousand and a half years away from Jesus and Paul. They're supposed to... dude, I can't even fake it. There's nothing loving about owning a man, giving him a wife, then letting that man go and keeping his wife and kids as your property. The reason it's so easy to call that unloving and immoral is simple: it's unloving and immoral. You cannot lovingly keep a man from his wife and kids unless that man promises to be your slave for life. And you cannot morally do it either. What you've done is known as begging the question. It reaches a conclusion by assuming it to be true in the first place. God is love. Therefore, everything he does will be loving and moral. If he has rules for keeping, buying, trading, beating banging and selling slaves, they must be loving and moral rules for keeping buying trading beating banging and selling slaves. Because he's love! That's not thinking. That's making horrific excuses for horrific verses that are indefensible. You say God is love. I show you he is not. And you are so jedi-mind-committed to the "God is love" paradigm that you would rather endorse a patently immoral practice than admit that maybe, just maybe, the skeptics have a point on this one.

Seize the Day Carrying the Banner

Correct!

Nicely told.

Yip

Son of a gun, you're right!

Because it is

Lane Smith Anthony Hopkins Frank Langella

Anyone ever notice how SIT is perfectly represented in the Emperor's New Clothes story?

Based on the fact that Mel hasn't played a lot of characters played by others, I'm gonna take an educated guess and say Hamlet

Didn't we say go for it after enough time has passed, so long as you admit it? I don't remember

Cheated

Anyone?

Yes!

Yup

Not one verse or one explanation of one verse. I'll wait.

The lead actor on this movie still owns the 1948 Ford Super Deluxe that he waxed during an unwitting training sequence in the middle of the film.

Aliens arrive on Earth in gigantic vessels, just in time to witness the third installment of a zombie apocalypse franchise.

One of the worst shows in television history, unless, you know, you liked it. The forgettable theme song was written by Randy Newman. So were most other songs on the show, which was part Hill Street Blues, part Glee.

"I'm gonna let ya' in on a little secret, Ray. K-Mart sucks."